Persepolis 2.0

Internet activism and, specifically, social networking has been instrumental in organizing many of the 2009 Iranian election protests. Online sites have been uploading amateur pictures and video, and Twitter, Facebook, and blogs have been places for protesters to gather and exchange information. Although some scholars in the West stress that Twitter has been used to organize protests, Iranian scholars argue that Twitter was hardly used by Iranian citizens in the midst of the 2009 protests.

Twitter in particular has been seen a key central gathering site during the protests.

The U.S. State Department urged the company to postpone a scheduled network upgrade that would have briefly put the service offline. Twitter delayed the network upgrade from midnight American time/morning Iran time to afternoon American time/midnight Iran time "because events in Iran were tied directly to the growing significance of Twitter as an important communication and information network", but at the same time denied that the State Department had "access to our decision making process". Social networking sites became the primary source of information, videos, and testimonials of the protests. Major news outlets, such as CNN and BBC News, gained much of their information from using and sorting through tweets by Twitter users and videos uploaded to YouTube. The use of social networking became central enough to the reports from Iran to make Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Gordon Brown state that the way the internet has democratised communication has forever changed the way foreign policy can be carried out and even suggest that web-based social networking could have prevented the Rwandan genocide.

Several reports disagree that the role of Twitter is central to the protests.The Economist magazine stated that the Twitter thread IranElection was so deluged with messages of support from Americans and Britons that it "rendered the site almost useless as a source of information—something that Iran's government had tried and failed to do".The Economist asserted that the most comprehensive sources of information in English by far were created by bloggers who pulled out useful information from the mass of information, of whom it singles out Nico Pitney of the Huffington Post, Andrew Sullivan of The Atlantic and Robert Mackey of the New York Times. A study by social media analytics company Sysomos shows that of 65 million population, there are only 19,235 Twitter users who disclose their location as Iran.

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Wikipedia